Idiom
all thumbs
Meaning
Clumsy; awkward; not dextrous.
Meaning adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Examples
“I'm all thumbs today and keep dropping things.”
“He tried to fix the watch but was all thumbs and made it worse.”
“The nervous apprentice, usually skilled with delicate instruments, became all thumbs the moment the master craftsman entered the workshop.”
Examples
simple
“I'm all thumbs today and keep dropping things.”
contextual
“He tried to fix the watch but was all thumbs and made it worse.”
complex
“The nervous apprentice, usually skilled with delicate instruments, became all thumbs the moment the master craftsman entered the workshop.”
Origin
Derived from the sixteenth-century proverb "when he should get aught, each finger is a thumb." The expression was recorded in John Heywood’s Collection of 1546, describing a specific anatomical redundancy that renders one entirely incapable of grasping the matter at hand.
Key words
Related idioms
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